Symposium of Fire

11.11.2016

This site has fulfilled its purpose; it has documented the Obama years in verse, and allowed me to maintain my sanity. What comes after will be different, and perhaps on a different medium. The four books of The Spy in the House of God are:

* Poems from after this period may have ended up in the anthology. These dates are approximate.

Have you considered writing or reading traditional poetry, that is, poetry which follows strict structural rules whether rhyme, rhythm, syllables or subject? If, having read through what I have written you are still in doubt that such a thing is possible now, that beauty in verse and poetry is possible anymore, then as they say, go your way.

But for the rest of you, especially those of you who write, simply start by imitating a writer you enjoy, when you are inspired to do so. There is no need to share the poetry with anyone, but reading it aloud is very helpful. I have been doing a series on various poets of our language (English, that is) on Social Matter. I will continue that, of course, and if you find a poet you like, that should be your starting place.

This marks the end of my fourth cycle of poetry, this one called "The Voice of the Four Winds." Those who visit the blog will notice that it stopped following my normal "kairometer" color changes, which are the normal liturgical season colors. This is because I sensed, and had long sensed, that an era was coming to an end, specifically an era to which my dissident poetic voice was germane. A flight of birds is a traditional symbol of the departure of souls - of death.

While I have never been a political poet, and will not ever appreciably be (unless the politics should become whether royalism should be considered--) there has indeed been a political element or color to this work. The Voice of the Four Winds was about what the poem says, the end of the dream of Enlightenment. It may be that it stumbles along for another century (such is very likely) but I see in the recent political changes, away from the Enlightenment-inspired democratic internationalism (itself a development of democratic nationalism in reaction to the wars it created when it repudiated classical international law) and towards a reactionary form - form at least - of nationalism.

If it is to be classified as a form of fascism, I think that's not inaccurate. As I am not part of a political party nor speak for or against any of such, I think that present movements could be read as a retread of fascism, but a fascism that is isolationist rather than aggressive; as from the sovereign standpoint what got the fascists in trouble was their willingness to play the aggression game with the then-nascent "international community". This mistake will not be repeated, and certainly the emergence of a nascent national socialism (which I've privately predicted as being one of the two possible normal endpoints of democracy) is not surprising at all.

National socialism tends to combine both nativist and socialist views which both tend to be low-status but high energy. This happens naturally in the democratic cycle of "mobs, then experts, then mobs again" (as per Davila) when the high status mobs (say, for civil rights) and their elite masters fail thoroughly enough. At that point, there is an opening for a centrist candidate who is not moderate - for usually centrism is a moderation of different views which makes them acceptable to the status quo and gives everyone a little taste of what they want, but not the whole hog -- but rather who combines high-energy, low-status, fringe movements who are quite numerous and now willing to row the boat in the same direction.

There is definitely a racial aspect to this, and it is white. But whiteness is complex; I am an Englishman by heritage, and even that identity is itself a combination of tribes (Jutes, Danes, Angles, Saxons, etc) put together for practical reasons. Whiteness as an idea, by the very notion that it is whites and half-whites who simply invented the concern for "minorities" as it is, contains within it both a tremendous pride and chauvinism, as well as a consideration for strangers who are legitimate citizens or subjects of that realm.

Overall, the history of anti-racism is simply the attitudes of high-status-aping and high-class whites against low-status and low-class whites. Minorities were, in this game, simply a side-show and a prop used to demonstrate the moral superiority (and thus right to lord over) of the high-status whites, generally the group Moldbug refers to as Brahmins. Anti-racism is from my perspective, and I think the long-term Christian view will be, simply hatred of the poor.

As Carlyle points out, political equality makes those not capable of realizing it appear to be solecisms; literal miscreations. And such political equality had rendered the poor. Feminism is much like it, and of course unbridled capital is glad to have access to new, cheaper workers; not because it is evil but because it knows its incentives. Socialists, while seeming to oppose such excesses, merely were jealous of the power and wanted also to exploit, but for what they thought of as a good cause. There is no reason to assume that capital can be responsible to drive the best interests of any group of people other than the person presently holding the capital. If not at the service of some realm, it will not, as hoped by liberal fantasists, become its own realm, but rather slowly ruin itself by ruining the source of its prosperity by following its incentives to their end.

This symbolic repudiation is the theme of the Wind book, "Voice of the Four Winds" and it is the winds' voices who seem to say, calling as a symbol of judgment and ruin, that there are very many empty spaces to blow through. Where is the substance? It is long gone.

Thus to me this result - and we refer in this case to the recent Presidential election at the head of the world empire in disarray - was rather inevitable, though not by any means certain. By this is mean, it must needs have eventually happened, but whether one or another contender had succeed at achieving it was not certain. I cannot tell the future, but I can discern the shape of the sky, as our Lord says.

This volume spans a longer time than the others due to fewer poems being written per month, mainly because during this last period my work became far less experimental and far more intentional. Here are the poems. which begin where "Adrift Without a Star" ended. These poems are historical-anecdotal, they tell, like a Steely Dan song, part of a real fragment of real history which might otherwise be unrecorded:

Without

Storm

The Orator Tells of His Secret Joy

Burning Down the House

The Song at the Cusp of the Sky

Raeleen's Song

The Exile

Conception

The Rose of Love

Stepping Out

The Auspex in the Winter Light

The Sage Ponders Human Industry

The Dancer's Daughter

Artificial Intelligence

Words and Deeds

Want and Lack

The Driver's Question

The Song at the Waiting Sea

The Fire of Hearth

The Orator Speaks of the Heart

Another Canticle for Stories

The Time of Iron

Candle

Lottery

Harry Lee

Third

The Good Mother

The Sage Speaks of the Social Medium

The Orator Dismisses his Accuser

Will and Testament

Eggman

No Man

Rosemary Green

A House United*

The Orator to the Soothsayers

Fifty Shades of Grey

Wormwood

Laboring Song

Crocodile Song

The Cathedral

To Nothing

Rain Comes

Canticle for Mentation

Who Will Wait For Us

Schwarzchild and Cassandra

Humanism

Revision

The Two Before the Storm

A Heart of Darkness

A Spy In the House of God

Political Correctness

Storm and Dusk

Six-Twenty-Six (6.26)

Partly Cloudy

Everlasting No More

Far Away

The Auspex Sings to Rigel Kent

The Orator to the Dancer

The Sage to the Doctor

The Poet and the Auspex

Sonnet VI "Leverage"

The Sage Considers the Dusk

The Orator Considers the Spectacle of Power **

Physics

Determination

The Song of Winnowing

The Court's Witness

Pandora's Spirits

The Novel

Sun and Shadow

Seven Canticles for Prudence

Twelve Types

The Stone on the Shore

Holography

Cold Sun

Eleven-Thirteen (11/13)

To a Persian Rug

A View to a Kill

The Rectification of Names

Rest

The Young

The Final Lecture

Winter's Afternoon

Aeons

A Song of Winter

Hall of Mirrors

A Canticle for Flight

The Song at the Great Chasm

The Song of the Shacks on the Shore

The Future

Colder Still That Metal Box

Blessing For a Woman

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Nineteen-Eighty-Three (1983)

By the Waters of Babylon

Ever-Near

Ars Poetica

Borders

The Orator Announces the Age

The Song of the Pipes

The Song of the Idol

The Sage Discards the Modern Style

Fifty's Lottery

Bridge Song

The Sage offers the Dire Solution

Leave

The Song of the Mirror

To Silence

Gun Control

The Longest Mile

A House Divided

To Sickness

The Words of the Companion

Under the Sun

The Milling-Stone

Water Under the Bridge

Verses for Economy

O Thou Light of Good Cheer

Pace

The Orator Remarks Upon the Digital Word

Sea Before Storm

The Song of the Viols

Love and Hate

Tanuki Song

The Onion

Zombie Nation

Sailing to Naples

Rex

Dux

The Voice of the Four Winds

The Inquisitor Speaks

*Also Published at The Mitrailleuse
** The image for this poem was in fact changed much later.

Enjoy reading all of the poems on this site (I should suspect there are at least five hundred good ones) and look forward to new work which will take a different form.

11.08.2016

Moloch is us; they have said
And right they were, for they saw
Seeing not with eyes of the dead
Knowing with a less-crooked law;
We railed at them, fine words
Which were the babbling of a child
Just the sharpening of swords
Our press the problem reconciled;
Our religion was eaten from within
By him, but it is us we must assay
The Inquisitor says of our sin:Qui facit per alium, facit per se.
The end of the thing is found
Not in the lights of Shangri-la
The age of Aquarius? No sound--
But ogres, and the gaping maw;
The world outside of God is darkness.
And God is darkness! Did you know
With "philosophy" no less
They made "above" as it is below?
I shall have my satisfaction;
Followers of Strauss! I bring news--
Has God returned to take action--?
Flee then, where no man may pursue!
Take your cleverly laid fables
Your demons, your dispersed law
We come to clean the stables
We come red in tooth and claw;
White is our tunic of linen-made
Red blood of the cross there brazen
With gold and silver it is inlaid
The sign of victory, it is our blazon;
The Inquisitor speaks, for it is he
The sage, the orator, the poet
It is he who is in truth these three
They are but one, and they know it;
Followers of Strauss! Who else--
Swing gaily from the battlement;
"If ye had yet judged yourselves
You'd have not come under judgment."

11.01.2016

"The Dream is dead, the Dream is dead"
That is what the voices of the four winds said;
Calling at the window, rattling at the door
Unseen voices which cannot speak a word
If they once could they cannot any more
Yet this is a semblance of what I heard;

The east wind calls from the morning of the world
The light that was lost when the flag was unfurled
The spring which will not come for them again
Who once laid claim to the innermost light
There will be no more budding of their crops or their men
Let them watch with their lamps in the night;

The south wind sings in the burning zenith-bright
Of walking men in darkness in the mid day's light
Their summers of no cotton, their men of no truth
Who know no thing for what it may be
Their judgements of no power, their mercies of no ruth
Who seek but cannot find equality;

The west wind rumbles in the sunset of the West
With tears it calls beseeching to those we love the best
That have forgotten God, he the crown of our year
His it is now, then to roll up like a cloth
So remember beauty, and the dread of his fear
Kiss the Son quickly then, lest you find Him wroth;

The north wind howls at the pitch of twilight-time
Of those who have not reason, of those who have not rhyme
No good shall be performed in this winter of their soul
Seeming quick to listen, but of their charity
All shall eat and eat but yet never find their full
Passing over good for cold chains of slavery;

Such things have I heard when awake in the night
The death of man's progress, the snuffing of his light
But the winds at this must laugh, for we have been misled
Man went nowhere, for long ago he lost his mark
Yes the four winds said, yes, the Dream is truly dead
Man who was Enlightened was sleep-walking in the dark.

10.30.2016

Of he, royalty's conquering son
Bright-faced, prince of cavalry
His dragoons ride with the sound of the gun
And brooks he no base rivalry;
Flames burst forth from tower to tower
His foes must shrink, their faces glower
Announcing his ride from the waiting sea
In this the bright and conquering hour;

He enters the city, though not his yet
But all he sees comes to his hand
Estates and clans will fill his net
Sparse it is, set across the land;
But does no miracles to deceive
He does not need men to believe
For sight is sufficient to understand
Raised chin, sharp eye, laurel wreath;

Usurper they say, who clutch the crown
And wear it not, for they fear the wind
Which bears a bruised reed to the ground
Considering but how he must have sinned
Who bears upon their castles dim
From the plain unto the ocean's rim
But the Duke instead, he merely grinned
For all of these shall come to him.

10.22.2016

Terror is something like power;
For in power there is terror indeed;
And fear where strength does tower;
For strength makes fear exceed;
But terror is not power, nor is fear
A difficult thing for some to hear
For God is great, and without need
His peace and dread draw near;

She loves the fearful things in truth
For only strength gives security;
And fear its sign, and even ruth
Is the seal of its magnanimity;
We do not like to be terrorized
A difficult thing some have realized;
For woman senses power and purity
Awesome when it is exercised;

Might is seen in great sacrifice
And true sacrifice needs strength
Giving all has both art and artifice
And art is but giving at length;
The king is such an object of fear
A difficult cross for man to bear
But his giving is then giving thanks--
And his art is powerful, terrible, fair.

10.13.2016

Where the young sit quietly, alone
The aged laugh, their deck chairs
Sit on layer upon layer of stone
Unlost anymore in worldly cares
Add to the rubble and wreck
A fragment of immemorial liturgy
Bottle by bottle tossed off-deck
Trash on trash by the lapping sea;

They think to live forever perhaps
The young alone seem to believe
And silent, watch each wave collapse
That they might live on, disease
Captures middle age with trash
But the patients suffer little for ill
Walk among graffiti, bat not a lash
Knowing this the country of the old, still.

10.09.2016

It is well known of the flyThat he must seek his foodHis is not to question whyNor to know of ill or goodThe dead as well we knowEven walking to and froHave but this single mood--And no more hope nor grow;

When the rot at first sets inThe smell must flies attractBut of those dead just withinWas the living they had attacked;America, the zombifiedShould be quite well over-flied--But no flies their mien detractAs their drug is formaldehyde.

Seismographic Radar

A Poem

Is a curious device which is not unlike a part of an unknown whole; or as if a watchmaker had inspiration to make all of the parts of the watch before knowing either what it was or that he was a watchmaker at all.

It speaks to and from that mode of thinking which is almost purely masculine; it is not unlike music but is not music, it is the cousin of music and its companion. It has a tripartite nature like music in rhythm, rhymes and narrative.

It is almost pure play, and so is accused of mere cleverness or frivolity, but it is also in deadly earnest. In this way, it is like a play of masks or a pageant, but it must be kept with an eye that sees beyond the device itself.

It is an object both of time and space; the mystery of representation and symbol that is in art and music finds its truest expression here. It is still and yet moves, if it is ugly it is instead grotesque, it shocks and appalls the earthly senses, but the incision is clean; the heart is pulled free if but for a moment to ascertain what is really there.

A Purpose

To call to mind that which persists through the flux of time in bright relief of silver and gold -- as it was of old.